Category archive: Current events

For all I know the sky was quite dramatic over other places too, but it was in Brixton that I saw it:

Often, when I show photos here, they were taken days, weeks, months or even years ago. Yesterday, there were photos that were taken ten years ago. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but: the above photos were taken earlier this evening, when I journeyed out to Brixton Curry’s PC World Carphone Warehouse or whatever the &&&&& it’s called, to try and to fail to buy a new TV. Which means that this is topical meteorological reportage.

Click on any of the above photos if you wish, and if you do you’ll get the bigger versions. But I actually think that the smaller versions are more dramatic, because more abstract and less of something. Like little oil paintings. Especially the first one.

I heard about this soon after it happened, because I had been semi-following the game, on account of it being at the Oval and involving Surrey. When it said “play stopped by crowd trouble” or some such thing, here, I at once tuned into the internet radio commentary, and replayed the strange moment when they saw this arrow stuck in the pitch and the players all either walked off or ran off. Later, they reckoned the arrow must have come from outside the ground, not from one of the stands. So, not crowd trouble after all. Good.

Usually, when there’s an act of obvious terrorism by an obvious terrorist, the BBC makes a big thing of not jumping to the obvious conclusion about why it happened. But this time, it really wasn’t obvious, and so far as I know, it’s still a mystery. I mean, why fire just one small arrow at a four day county cricket game, which was already heading for a draw, watched by a largely empty stadium? A small shower of arrows, into the crowd, and preferably a dense crowd, well, that might have caused some real grief and real panic. As it was, it felt more like some bizarre accident rather than anything very malevolent. A kid maybe? Or just someone really, really stupid.

Mind you, I’d not be nearly so relaxed about all this had Surrey been chasing down a target of about a hundred, which earlier in the day it looked like they might contrive to be doing, despite all of yesterday having been rained off. Had this mysterious incoming arrow turned a probable Surrey win into a draw, then clearly Middlesexist terrorism would be an obvious motive to be looking at. But Middlesex had already batted themselves out of trouble, and a game that was already dead on its feet managed to get put out of its misery in a way that was really rather interesting, entertaining even, given that nobody got hurt.

Surrey have made a point of drawing games this year. They have scored just one win so far, but are sitting pretty safe in mid-table. Yorkshire have two more wins than Surrey, but fewer points, on account of Surrey having only lost one game, with their other eight all drawn. Yorkshire have won three but lost four.

Meanwhile, test cricket has also been pretty lively, but in a good way:

So, Test cricket is in danger, is it? Ha! Test cricket laughs in the face of danger. Twice in the space of 14 hours, the game’s world order has been thoroughly rattled, with two of the most memorable results in recent years. The first jolt came at Headingley, where West Indies upset England for their first victory in the country since 2000; the next day in Mirpur, Shakib Al Hasan bowled Bangladesh to a thrilling, historic maiden win over Australia.

The danger, that test cricket just laughed at, being the danger of tedium and of insignificance. Not arrows.

I have not yet read and probably never will read James Damore’s internal memo that went external, about diversity policies within Google, the one that got him fired. But just in case I do want to read it, here is the full text.

And here is a conversation between James Darmore and Jordan Peterson. I haven’t watched all this either, but so far Peterson has been doing a lot of the talking. But the fact that Damore doesn’t mouth off a lot actually reinforces the feeling that he’s a good guy, if somewhat naïve.

Samizdata has also had a lot of Google/Damore posts recently, here, here (lots of good stuff and links to good stuff in that one), here, here, and here.

Damore was naive, in particular, about what will get you fired. Most people know that if you criticise your bosses and it gets out, they do not like it. The better you do it and the more it gets out, the more they do not like it. Damore did it pretty well and it got out a lot.

Normally, I’d say that Google wanting only employees with “googliness”, of whom Damore proved himself not to be one, would be reasonable. But the trouble is, Google is in the business of making judgements about what opinions should and should not be allowed on the internet, encouraged, discouraged, and so on. For that job, they need political diversity. Unless, of course, they’ve decided to ignore the other half of America.

Which might make sense. That other half of America is, in global terms, a rather unusual bunch of people. As are the “other halfs” of all other countries. The “cosmopolitans” of the world, insofar as they really are a single group, are the biggest and, crucially, the richest group of people in the world. But what if actually, the two halves of America, and the two halves of everywhere else, each have more in common with one another than they do with all the other cosmopolitans? Stay, as the saying goes, tuned.

My own hunch is that Google ignoring half of America will be bad for business. I mean, even the cosmopolitan Americans will want, from time to time, to actually pay attention to the other half, to find out about how, for instance, the other half votes and might be persuaded to vote differently. If Google’s googliness gradually stops helping them do that …?

June 30th (i.e. tomorrow): Barry Macleod-Cullinane is a Conservative local councillor, and as a libertarian of long standing he is perfectly qualified to speak about “Townhall Libertarianism”.

July 28th: Leandro d’Vintmus is a Brazilian, and a musician. And also interested in how political and psychological libertarianism interact and reinforce each other. Very different from the usual sort of Brian’s Last Friday, and all the better for it.

Aug 25th: Nico Metten will speak about “Libertarian Foreign Policy”. Nico is your classic unswerving libertarian, except that he talks rather quietly. Insofar as, in this complex matter, there are distinctions to be made, subtleties to be teased out, hairs to be split, we can depend upon him to make them, tease them out, split them.

Oct 27th: Rob Fisher, who is a parent, will offer some reflections about that.

Also fixed: January 26th 2018: Tim Evans, Professor in Business and Political Economy at Middlesex University Business School, will speak about the business of higher education, which is one of Britain’s most significant export industries. We libertarians are used to complaining about higher education for the bad ideas that if all too often spreads. But what about the economics of the higher education business?

The internet loves animals, especially cats and dogs, and I went looking for Grenfell Tower animal stories. Because, there’s always an animal angle, to just about any story, even if it wasn’t an animal story to start with.

Did many pets die in the Grenfell Tower disaster? I wasn’t able to answer that one. But there have been a number of stories about pets who either can’t now stay with their current owners, or whose owners have died. Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, for instance, is helping out with temporary pet accommodation.

Animals were also heavily involved in the search for bodies in the wreckage, as MSM news explains:

Specially trained dogs are also vital to the mission. The search process is painstaking, and as dogs are smaller, more agile, and have such a keen sense of smell (better than any technology), the animals have been deployed at more challenging areas.

The upper floors of the 24-storey high rise, those most damaged, and where people are most likely to have been killed, benefit particularly from the dogs’ expertise.

The canines come from the LFB and the MET’s urban search crews. They’re given special equipment, and even little boots to protect their feet from heat and broken glass. While obviously dangerous, no fire dog has ever been harmed while out on an operation.

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The dogs mean the sad and devastating process of finding the missing will be quicker. They can get into parts of the building humans simply can’t get to.

I particularly like the bit about those “little boots”. Nice touch. Both in the sense of what this detail adds to the story, and in the sense that this must make life easier for the dogs, despite any doubts the dogs might have when first made to put their little boots on.

More about these dogs and their boots, with a picture, here, in a story from last year.

It feels hard to write about anything else in London, other than that towering inferno. This story will run and run, because it partakes of both genuine emotions of the strongest sort, and politicians and media people eager to fan the flames. What happened? Who exactly has died? Whose fault was it? You can’t blame the media. Their job is to tell true stories, and this is one hell of a true story.

Politically, if you had tried to hand-craft a disaster calculated to do the most possible damage to the Conservative government, and to most encourage what now seems to be a rising tide of Corbynism, you could hardly have done it more perfectly. Those political people who are now fanning the flames are filled with passionate moral self-confidence. How on earth the long-term politics of all this will pan out, I have no idea.

Would a Corbynite government really turn Britain into Venezuela? Probably not, but why take the chance? That’s what I say. But will enough of my fellow Brits agree with me, when the time to say comes round again? As of now, it feels like: no.

In the movie of that name, the inmates were all rich and glamorous. Well, they would be, they were played by movie stars. And the fire spread slowly enough to last for a whole movie.

This tower contained mere people, and the flames spread very quickly, like … wildfire.

I presume that the social media are ablaze with images of this tower, but for me, being the age I am, it’s the Evening Standard that really brings these sorts of things home:

As you can see, they originally went with “Inferno”, but later changed it to the more politically charged “Death Trap”. On the telly, the story was already developing, along the lines of: they were warned. But they did nothing.